The teleporter is a sci-fi staple, featured in everything from Star Trek to The Fly. Who hasn’t dreamed of cutting down their commute using a teleporter! Heck, it might even cost less than the Marsa junction project. But would it? How feasible is building a teleporter and how would it work?

Let’s start small and extrapo­late from there, teleporting a sugar cube.

Our sugar cube is made of sucrose molecules. A combination of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen atoms. Molecules are quantum objects so their information can be encoded and simulated very faithfully on a quantum computer. The teleporter must then transfer this information, called a quantum state, from location A to location B. With quantum computers, special quantum bits of information known as entangled qubits allow us to transfer this information from A to B without a connection between the two locations. Operating on the entangled qubits at B we can recreate the information of A.

We have a plan! Encode your sucrose molecule onto a quantum computer, teleport this information to a quantum computer at your desired destination and reconstitute the sugar from the simulation.

But aye, there’s the rub. Sucrose has 12 carbons, having four outer electrons, 22 Hydrogens, having one electron, and 11 oxygens having five outer electrons. All told, that’s 48+22+55 = 125 electron orbitals to model, meaning 250 qubits to account for spin. IBM is hoping to announce a 127-qubit machine later this year and we’re still a long way from 250 qubits.

Scale this to a human with 7X1027 atoms and you’d need a gargantuan number of qubits to carry out our plan; requiring two quantum computers, likely each the size of a planet (using today’s technology) and spending enough money to build a countable infinity of Marsa junctions.